On a Monday when most people are probably grumbling and whining their way to work and begrudgingly starting their day’s work – going through e-mails, lists of things-to-do, meeting-schedules, dreading performance-reviews, unmet deadlines, pending or impending presentations etc etc, I’m sitting in my lovely balcony, cozy in my old sweatshirt, admiring my potted plants – some of which I re-potted first thing this morning – simply because I felt like doing it and because the weather has been awesome with some rain and a sharp plunge in the temperature. I’m sitting here with my cup of hot tea, and every now and then I’m saying brrr… it’s cold! What a delight for someone coming from an always-hot-always-humid Bombay. I don’t know if I said this before, but after resolutely detesting Hyd for many months, I finally gave up some time ago, as the city started feeling like home, and growing on me in spite of myself.
But most of all, I’m sitting, thinking about what a lovely weekend we had, and if I had to, what I would name it. Am undecided on what fits best: the Hitchcock weekend – because I saw three of the most awesome Hitchcock movies (Vertigo, The trouble with Harry, and Psycho), or maybe the alco-weekend because we drank pretty much the whole weekend or if you insist on knowing - on Friday evening, Saturday evening, Sunday afternoon and on Sunday evening (I told you – the whole weekend). So maybe I’ll just call it the cold-wet-super-social-food-n-drink-n-movie weekend – to sum it all and leave out nothing.
This was also a weekend when we did some new things. Nets and I got quite light-headed (trust me that is a polite understatement) at Firefly, and giggled like school-girls, tried to woo some men into dancing with us (we did that by loudly proclaming that we were single and ready to mingle) and as tokens of the fantastic evening we flicked the cheapie decorative battery-operated lamps from our table - just for the kicks of flicking something. That was a first.. am not too proud of it (esp considering that i don't even like the lamp all that much!) but a first nevertheless. A few hours later we drove down to some obscure little corner of the city and found a blessed all-night-idli-dosa-vendor and pigged out on his yummy fares like they were giving away prizes for eating. I guess I could add to the list the short lesson in classical singing that I got from RK, as well as my newly acquired knowledge of lomo photography. Oh, and the fact that I enrolled myself on half a dozen online-photo-communities and sites.
The highlight however, was the realization that everyday our world is shrinking, and we have no choice but to be open-minded about our fading lines of regionalism and clans. This happened last evening when three Konkanis, one Telugu and one Punjabi-by-birth-Bombayite-in-fact, spent the evening singing old hindi songs, rehearsing for an English play, eating some Chinese food and watching a Japanese movie.
And which is probably another reason why we love Obama so. He’s charming and sincere and all that – but like so many of us in India, he is also a mish-mash of many cultures and a product of much travel and transfer. He’s just like us. Or we're just like him. Whoopie! Don’t we just love to bask in reflected glory.
But hey… it’s cold here! I’m going back in, and you should get back to work.
Ciao!